SAN FRANCISCO--Sun Chief Executive Scott McNealy on Tuesday urged participation in a shared effort to create freely available online educational materials for schools.
The effort, called the Global Education and Learning Community, produces curriculum materials such as online books for students in kindergarten through 12th grade. McNealy envisions the replacement of expensive and quickly out-of-date textbooks by shared online instructional materials, testing, grading and assessment tools, all created by experts.
"This is all about open-sourcing K-12 educational materials. Imagine you have a...community-led process where we can get the best educators to create the world's best third-grade math textbook and make it free," McNealy said at the JavaOne trade show here. "Help contribute your time, your energy, your focus and maybe even your money."
Sun, suffering from flat revenues and break-even profitability, is trying to recover some of the relevance and prominence it had in the dot-com boom of the late 1990s. Part of that effort is seemingly altruistic work such as boosting the GELC and helping to bring computing and communication technology to the have-nots on the lesser side of the digital divide.
However, it's not just feel-good work, but directly tied to the Sun's bottom line, Sun President Jonathan Schwartz argued in an interview on Tuesday. "The more people are on the network," he said, "the more demand there is for network infrastructure," which is Sun's primary business. "What's good for the world is good for our business."
Source For Full Article : http://news.com.com/Sun+makes+case+for+open-source+schooling/2100-1047_3-5766750.html?tag=nl
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